


Neville's Sorting or How Neville Was a Gryffindor All Along

by cynassa



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-05
Updated: 2018-07-05
Packaged: 2019-06-05 14:02:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15172259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cynassa/pseuds/cynassa
Summary: Neville didn’t hear his name being called, but a tall girl with a green barrette in her hair elbowed him and he stumbled forward. He could feel himself heating right up to his ears with the titter that ran throughout the hall.





	Neville's Sorting or How Neville Was a Gryffindor All Along

When Neville Longbottom, the boy who kept losing his toad,

was called, he fell over on his way to the stool. The hat took a

long time to decide with Neville. When it finally shouted

‘GRYFFINDOR’, Neville ran off still wearing it, and had to jog

back amid gales of laughter to give it to ‘MacDougal, Morag’.

* * *

 

Neville didn’t hear his name being called, but a tall girl with a green barrette in her hair elbowed him and he stumbled forward. He could feel himself heating right up to his ears with the titter that ran throughout the hall.

He made it up to the stool with his skin crawling from the weight of so many derisive eyes on him. Madam McGonagall beckoned him to sit with an imperious nod.  He almost collapsed and then dragged on the hat.

_Aren’t you a funny one?_

He froze. Then he thought at it, ‘are you the hat?’

_I’m the Sorting Hat made by Rowena Ravenclaw herself_ , it confirmed.

‘I don’t want to be here,’ he told it urgently. ‘I don’t belong here. I barely have any magic at all.’ A half-dozen memories of trying, and failing, to perform magic darted through his mind and left. His mother had shown magic at barely three months old, and his father had levitated half the house when they had taken his favourite toy away. Grandmother told him hundreds of stories of his parents’ exceptional abilities.

_Are you sure?_ It asked him, _You don’t want to be here? You want to give up and go home?_

I don’t, I’m not giving up… I’m not, I just don’t have magic. What would a Squib do at Hogwarts?

_You might be surprised_. It seemed amused in a strange way.

All those eyes on him… he’d been the weird awkward kid who dropped stuff during every party Grandmother had ever taken him to. He knew how it was. Everyone else would make friends and they’d shy away or pretend not to see him if he tried to say hi. At least at home he had his bushes by the lake, full of beautiful flowers where he could hide for hours with the moths and the little toads and the sleepy snakes.

_Hogwarts has a lake too_ , the Hat said idly, _and it has much more than dandelions, and a few measly common toads and rubbish grass snakes._

They aren’t rubbish, he told it fiercely. They were his _friends_. And he wasn’t going to let anyone make fun of them, or Trevor!

It hummed soothingly and somehow he seemed to see the terrifying lake they had just crossed in daytime, a beautiful blue ringed by plants he didn’t know at all. His curiosity stirred.

It’d be awful though, he thought, but only for a bit maybe. After all, he’d always managed before. And it couldn’t be much worse than making Grandmother think he had drowned in the lake when he had just fallen asleep under the mango tree.

_That’s decided then_ , the Hat said cheerfully.

Wait, what, Neville opened his mouth just as the Hat shouted out, GRYFFINDOR!


End file.
